She found Elara at the eastern wall, sitting with her back against the stone where she always sat when she wasn't working. The burn scar on her throat caught the midday light — pink and ridged, the skin still tight after months of healing. She was pulling apart a bundle of dried herbs Brenna had given her, separating stems from leaves with the focused patience of someone who needed her hands to do something so her head didn't have to.
Sera sat down beside her. No preamble.
"I need to ask you about where you're from."
Elara's hands didn't stop moving. "Which part."
"Stories. Moving pictures. Things you watched on screens." She kept her voice level. "Korr said Chris called them shows. Called some of them anime."
That got Elara to look up. Not surprise — something warier. The fire mage's eyes were dark and quick, and they moved across Sera's face the way they moved across a battlefield, reading angles and distances.
"Chris told you about that."
"Before. When he was still—" Sera gestured at the tree visible above the rooftops, canopy shifting in the wind. "Himself. He said he came from another world. That he used to watch stories on something called a screen. I didn't know what he meant then. I think I do now."
Elara set the herbs down. Her fingers were stained green. She studied Sera for a long moment, and whatever she saw made her lean back against the stone with a short exhale through her nose.
"Alright. What do you want to know?"
Sera had spent the night turning the images over in her head, sorting them the way her ability sorted emotional residue — by texture, by weight, by the shape they left behind. The burning blade. The shifting armor. The girl in light. The glass city. The shrine-tree that kept coming back, pulling everything else into orbit around it. She'd written them all down on parchment — charcoal drawings, rough and childlike, because she had no skill for illustration and the images were already starting to blur at the edges.
She pulled the parchment from inside her coat and spread it across her knees.
"I received something through the root network. Images. I think they came from Chris — from whatever's left of him inside the tree. Most of it I can't place. But some of it—" she tapped the drawing of the burning sword, "—Korr thinks it might be from his world. From the stories he watched."
Elara took the parchment. Her eyes moved across the drawings one by one, and Sera watched her face with the same intensity she'd once used to read a room full of diplomats. The specialist program had trained her to track microexpressions — the flicker of recognition, the flare of something half-remembered. Elara's face was doing a lot of both.
"This one." Elara's finger landed on the burning blade. Her voice had changed — younger, almost. "That's from Dragon Soul. It's a — it was a show. An anime, like Chris said. The main character's sword. It doesn't exist. It's drawn. Someone made it up."
"The armor." Sera pointed. "Plates that move on their own. Rearrange mid-swing."
"Magical Girl Empire. Different show. The armor's supposed to be powered by friendship or determination or something. I don't remember — I only watched a few episodes." Elara's mouth twisted. "We all did. When we were first summoned, before the collars went on, before we understood what was happening to us — we'd sit in the handlers' compound at night and talk about the shows we remembered. It was the only thing we had in common that wasn't this place."
Sera said nothing. Let the silence do its work.
"The chain-scythe," Elara continued, tapping another drawing. "Demon King Downfall. The spinning one with the glow — that's the main character's weapon from season three. And the city—" She stopped. Looked at Sera. "That one I'm less sure about. Could be from anything. Could be a hundred different shows. Glass towers aren't exactly rare in anime."
"The tree."
Elara's finger hovered over the last drawing — the massive tree with light at its roots, people gathered at its base. The shrine-tree that had kept surfacing through the flood, pulling the other images into formation around it.
"That could be from a lot of things," Elara said slowly. "World trees show up everywhere. Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life, the Great Root — every culture has one, and anime's no different. It's a symbol. It doesn't mean—"
"He's showing me weapons. Armor. A structure built around a tree." Sera's voice was flat. Controlled. The control cost her something. "If these are from stories — if they're things someone imagined and drew on a screen — then they're not real. They can't be built. They're fiction."
Elara was quiet. The wind moved through the canopy above them. A centaur foal somewhere in the village made a sound like a sneeze, then laughed.
"Yes," Elara said. "That's right. They're fiction."
Gerd was harder to pin down. The big man was always moving — wall repairs in the morning, weapons training with the refugees in the afternoon, hammer rhythms echoing across the village from dawn to dusk. Sera caught him during a break, sitting on an overturned log near the smithy with a waterskin in one hand and his hammer resting across his knees.
She showed him the drawings.
He looked at them the way he looked at everything — directly, without much subtlety, processing each one as a separate problem to be solved. The burning blade got a grunt. The shifting armor got a longer look and a scratch at his scarred forearm. The chain-scythe made him exhale through his nose.
"I watched that one," he said. His voice was a bass rumble, the kind that came from a chest built like a door. "Demon King Downfall. The scythe fight in season two was the reason I started training with a chain weapon back home." He paused. "Back in my world, I mean. Before."
"Could you make it? The scythe."
Gerd looked at her like she'd asked him to build a staircase to the moon. "Make it. Out of what? The glow part isn't — Sera, it's not a real thing. It's animation. Someone drew pictures of it and they moved on a screen. The physics don't work. The chain would snap, the blade wouldn't glow, and even if you could somehow make it spin that fast, the force would rip your arms off."
"The armor, then. Plates that shift and rearrange."
"I don't know enough about enchanting to tell you whether that's possible here. In my world it wasn't. In my world, magic wasn't real at all — that's the part I still can't get my head around. But moving plates that react to your body mid-swing?" He shook his head. "The engineering isn't there. Even if you had mages who could enchant metal to move like that, the power requirements would be — I don't know. I'm not a mage. I hit things with a hammer."
Sera took the drawings back. Rolled them. Slipped them into her coat.
"What about the tree?" she said. "A massive tree. Roots running through the ground like veins. Light coming from it instead of the sky. People gathered at its base."
Gerd drank from his waterskin. Wiped his mouth. Thought about it.
"That one's everywhere. Not just anime — though yeah, it's in anime too. Sacred trees, world trees, whatever you want to call them. People have been telling stories about trees like that for as long as there have been people to tell stories." He looked at her. "You're asking me if I think Chris is sending you visions from a cartoon."
"I'm asking you what you think it means."
Gerd set the waterskin down. His hands wrapped around the hammer's handle — not gripping it, just holding it, the way some people hold a comfort object.
"I think Chris is in there, and he's trying to talk to us, and he's using whatever he's got. If what he's got is memories of cartoons he watched when he was a kid in another world, then that's what he's using." He paused. "But Sera — those things aren't blueprints. They're stories. You can't build a story."
She left him on the log and walked back toward the tree with the parchment roll pressing against her ribs.
Tomas didn't want to talk.
The healer sat in the medical tent with his hands folded in his lap, eyes on the ground, the way he'd sat since the battle — present but removed, like a man watching his own life from across a room. Brenna had given up trying to draw him out weeks ago. She just made sure he ate and left him alone.
Sera sat across from him and spread the drawings on the ground between them. Tomas looked at them. His expression didn't change, but something behind his eyes flickered — brief, controlled, gone before she could name it.
"These are from shows," he said. Not a question. His voice was soft and flat, the voice of someone who'd trained himself not to take up space.
"You recognize them."
"Some of them. The sword is Dragon Soul. The scythe is Demon King Downfall. I didn't watch that one — some of the others did." A pause. "Lira watched it. She used to talk about the fight choreography."
Lira. One of the two who'd been executed. Sera didn't ask.
"The tree," she said instead.
Tomas looked at the drawing of the shrine-tree for a long time. Longer than the others. When he spoke, his voice had changed — something underneath the flatness, like a current moving deep below still water.
"That one could be from a dozen shows. Or it could be from all of them at once. World trees are — they're foundational. Every story that has magic has some version of a tree at the center of everything." He looked up. "Why are you asking me this?"
"Because I think Chris is sending these to me through the root network. And I think they're from his memories — from the stories he watched before he came here."
Tomas was quiet. His fingers tightened against each other, knuckles going white.
"Then he's sending you the only things he has left," he said. "The same things we had. Memories of a world we can't go back to, playing on repeat because there's nothing else to play." He looked back at the ground. "They're not instructions, Sera. They're not blueprints or prophecies. They're just — all he remembers of being human."
Pell was the most useful, which was ironic because Sera had expected him to be the least.
The thin scholar was sitting against the same broken wall where she'd first seen him writing, his leather-bound notebook open on his knee, pen moving in short precise strokes. He looked up when she approached, and his eyes dropped immediately to the parchment roll in her hand.
"Let me guess." He tapped his pen against the notebook. "You've been receiving images through the root network that correspond to visual media from Chris's world, and you want to know what they are."
Sera stopped. "How did you—"
"I'm a scholar. I observe and I record, and people keep not being subtle about the things they don't want to talk about." He gestured at the space beside him. "Sit. Show me."
She sat. Unrolled the parchment. Pell leaned forward, and his eyes moved across the drawings with an intensity that reminded her, uncomfortably, of the way Elara had looked at them — the flicker of recognition, the pull of something familiar from a life that no longer existed.
"Oh, that's good. That's very good." He was pointing at the chain-scythe. "The detail on the chain links is wrong — Demon King Downfall's version had interlocking hex-rings, not the oval pattern you've drawn here — but the overall silhouette is unmistakable. Season three, like Elara said. The Tempest Arc."
"You know it too."
"Everyone from our world knows it. It was — is — one of the most popular anime of the last decade." He sat back. "Sera, these are all from popular media. Dragon Soul, Magical Girl Empire, Demon King Downfall. The glass city might be from several things — it's a common enough aesthetic in speculative fiction. And the tree is, as I'm sure everyone has already told you, a universal motif."
"Then they're not real."
"They're not real in the sense that no one in Chris's world ever built a glowing sword or a self-assembling suit of armor. They're drawings. Animation. Very sophisticated drawings that move and tell stories, but drawings nonetheless." Pell paused. His pen tapped the notebook twice — a thinking rhythm. "However."
"However."
"However, Chris didn't spend his life watching these things for nothing. He was — is — a person who absorbed stories. The way some people absorb food. He internalized them. And now he's stuck inside a world tree, trying to communicate with the only person whose ability can receive what he's sending." Pell looked at her. "The images aren't blueprints. But they might be something more useful than blueprints."
"What."
"Direction." He said it like it was obvious. "Chris knows what this world has and what it doesn't. He knows what magic can do here and what it can't. He's not sending you a picture of a sword that glows and expecting you to build a sword that glows. He's sending you the idea of a sword that does something swords don't normally do. The concept. The direction. What you build from that concept — that's for you to figure out, using what you actually have."
Sera stared at him. The wind moved through the canopy. Somewhere in the village, Gerd's hammer started its afternoon rhythm — heavy, steady, the heartbeat of a man who processed the world through impact.
"He's telling us what to aim for," she said.
"He's telling you what he thinks is worth aiming for. There's a difference." Pell's voice was careful. Academic. The voice of someone who'd spent his life being precise about the difference between what something was and what people wanted it to be. "The glowing sword might not be buildable. But a sword with an edge enchantment that generates heat? That's within the range of what Brenna and Aldric could probably figure out, given time and materials. The armor might not rearrange itself, but layered plates with locking mechanisms controlled by simple enchantments? Also possible, in theory. The scythe—"
"I'm not asking about the weapons."
Pell stopped.
"The tree," Sera said. "He keeps showing me the tree. It comes back every time. The other images cluster around it."
Pell looked at the drawing of the shrine-tree. His pen went still.
"In Chris's world, the world tree is a story people tell about connection," he said. "Roots that run through everything. Branches that hold up the sky. It's not just a plant — it's a metaphor for the idea that everything is linked. That what happens to one thing happens to all things." He paused. "If Chris is sending you that image over and over, he might not be telling you to build a shrine. He might be telling you what he's becoming."
Sera said nothing for a long time. Pell went back to his notebook, pen moving again, recording something she couldn't see.
When she stood, her legs were stiff. The parchment roll felt heavier than it had that morning, weighted with five people's certainty that what she'd seen was fiction, and her own certainty that they were wrong.
Not wrong about what the images were. Wrong about what they meant.
She found Aldric in the rebuilt storehouse, sorting through the seed packets the Valdross envoy had left. The old hedge mage was thinner than he'd been before the ritual — his clothes hung off him like they'd been made for a larger man, which they had been, because the man they'd been made for had existed before he'd poured everything he had into a triangle of magic and collapsed face-first into the dirt. His hands trembled when he handled the small cloth packets, but his eyes were clear, and he hummed while he worked — tuneless and low, the sound a man makes when he's forgotten he's making it.
"Aldric."
"Sera." He didn't look up. "If you're here about the soil analysis, the elven botanists are running tests. Should have results by—"
"I'm not here about the soil."
He set a seed packet down. Looked at her. His face had the patient, open quality it always had — the quality of a man who'd spent his life being underestimated and had long since stopped minding.
She showed him the drawings.
Aldric studied them differently than the heroes had. No flicker of recognition — he'd never seen a screen in his life, had no idea what anime was, and the concept of moving pictures drawn on glass would have sounded to him like a fever dream. What he saw was shape and function. The blade with light running its edge. The armor with articulated plates. The scythe with its chain.
"Hmm," he said. "This one." He tapped the burning sword. "The edge — see how the light runs the full length? It's not just decoration. The way it's drawn, the light is doing something to whatever the blade is cutting. Disrupting it, maybe. Breaking it down at a structural level." He turned the parchment. "If you wanted to recreate the effect, you wouldn't need the light itself. You'd need an enchantment on the blade that destabilizes whatever it contacts. Heat-based, or maybe vibrational. The Valdross steel we received — if you enchanted one of those blades with a thermal array layered into the fold pattern—"
"I'm not here about the weapons, Aldric."
He blinked. Looked at her. "Then what?"
She pointed to the shrine-tree. "This. A structure built around the world tree. People gathered at its roots. He keeps showing it to me. Over and over."
Aldric's hands stopped trembling. He looked at the drawing for a long time — longer than he'd looked at any of the others. When he spoke, his voice had dropped into something quieter.
"A shrine."
"Maybe. Or a gathering place. Or both."
"Built around the tree." Aldric's finger traced the roots spreading outward from the drawing's trunk, the people gathered at their base. "In the old stories — the very old ones, before the empires, before the Barrens were called the Barrens — there were gods who lived in trees. Not spirits. Not entities. Gods. Beings so old that the difference between them and the land they grew from had stopped mattering. People would travel for weeks to sit at the roots of a god-tree and listen."
"Listen to what?"
"To whatever the tree was saying. Which was usually nothing in the way you or I mean nothing. More like — presence. The way being near something vast and old and alive makes you feel like you're hearing something even when no sound is being made." He set the parchment down. "If you wanted to build something like this, you wouldn't need Chris to tell you how. The design isn't the point. The point is the gathering."
Sera sat down on a seed crate. The storehouse smelled of dry grain and cloth and the faint green tang of soil that had been nowhere near the Barrens a few months ago.
"The refugees keep coming," she said. "Every week, more of them. They come because of the stories — the soil, the tree, the green zone. Some of them kneel when they see it. I've watched them. They touch the roots and close their eyes and they're not just looking for food or shelter. They're looking for something to believe in."
Aldric nodded slowly. "People who've lost everything always are."
"Chris is in that tree. What's left of him. And he's reaching out — sending me things, spending pieces of himself to do it, the shaman says it costs him every time. If people are already gathering, already treating it like something sacred—"
"You want to give them somewhere to gather."
"I want to give them somewhere to gather that isn't just dirt and roots. A structure. Something with walls and a roof and a purpose." She paused. The words were coming faster than she'd intended, tumbling out with a momentum that surprised her. "Not a temple. Not yet. Something simpler. An open shrine. A place where people can sit at the roots and — whatever. Pray. Listen. Be near something that makes them feel like the world isn't entirely dead."
"And the old god?" Aldric's voice had changed. Sharper. His trembling hands pressed flat against the table. "What old god?"
Sera looked at him. "The one Chris credits with starting all of this. An ancient being who appeared to him when he first arrived in the Barrens. Gave him seeds and soil. Chris doesn't talk about it much — couldn't describe the figure, only the feeling. Ancient. Patient. Like the ground itself had decided to speak."
Aldric was staring at her. Not at the drawings. At her.
"Show me the tree again." His voice was barely above a whisper.
She tapped the shrine-tree drawing. Aldric leaned forward, and his finger traced the massive trunk, the roots spreading like veins, the people gathered at the base. His hand shook — not the constant tremor she was used to, something else. Something older.
"When I was young," he said, "before I washed out of the Academy and wound up in the Barrens, I went to the Holy Capital. Pilgrimage. Every aspiring mage makes the trip at least once — the temples are supposed to inspire devotion to the craft, or to the gods who oversee it, or to whatever combination the empires are selling that century." He paused. His finger was still on the drawing. "The main hall has statues of all the recognized gods. Row after row, towering things — marble and gold and enchanted stone. The Sun Father. The Three Sisters of Harvest. The Warbringer. Each one bigger than the last, each one with offerings piled at its feet and priests circling like moths."
He was quiet for a moment. The storehouse creaked around them, old wood settling.
"There was one statue in the corner. Tucked behind a column, almost out of sight. No gold. No offerings. No priests. Smaller than all the others by half, carved from plain grey stone that had started to crumble at the edges. I remember because I asked one of the temple attendants who it was, and she looked at me like I'd asked about a stain on the floor." His mouth twisted. "She said, 'That one is the Sower. Nobody remembers why he's here anymore. He was one of the first, they say. The oldest. But his worship faded centuries ago, and the empires keep the statue out of obligation, not devotion.'"
Aldric pulled his hand back from the drawing.
"The Sower. An old god of seeds and soil and growth. One of the first — older than the Harvest Sisters, older than the war gods, older than the empires that built the temple around him. And by the time I saw him, he'd been reduced to a crumbling stone in a corner that nobody looked at." He met Sera's eyes. "If Chris was visited by something ancient that gave him seeds and told him to grow — and then he grew this—"
He gestured at the wall, at the tree visible beyond it, at the green zone spreading outward through dead soil.
"Then it wasn't random. It wasn't luck. A god who's been forgotten for centuries chose a man in a dead hut in the Barrens and handed him the seeds to remake a continent. And now you want to build a shrine to him."
It wasn't a question. Aldric's eyes had that look again — the same thing she'd seen in Oswin, in Pell. The hunger of a small person handed something vast.
"Publicly," Sera said. "A shrine to the Sower — to the old god. The tree is the center. The gathering is the purpose. And underneath—" she stopped. "Underneath, it's Chris. It's always been Chris. But people need a god right now more than they need a man who turned himself into a tree, and a shrine to the Sower gives them one without lying to them."
Aldric studied her face. His old eyes were shrewd in a way that reminded her, suddenly and uncomfortably, of Pell.
"You've thought about this."
"I've been thinking about nothing else since the images started coming."
"The heroes told you the images were fiction."
"Yes."
"And you don't agree."
Sera was quiet. The hammer rhythm from outside had stopped — Gerd's break, probably. The storehouse was very still.
"They told me the sword can't be built and the armor doesn't work and the scythe would tear my arms off," she said. "And they're right. About the specifics. About the exact things Chris showed me." She looked at Aldric. "But Chris isn't sending me specifics. He's sending me direction. The idea of weapons that do more than weapons should. The idea of protection that adapts. The idea of a tree at the center of everything, with people at its roots. Maybe he can't build any of it either. Maybe it's all impossible. But he believes in it enough to spend pieces of himself pushing it through the network to me, and I —"
She stopped. Breathed.
"Maybe they can't see it," she said. "Those images mean something different to them than they do to me. To the heroes, they're just stories — things from before. Familiar but finished. They can't see past what those images are to what they're pointing at. But Chris isn't sending me memories for nostalgia. He's sending me direction. And he's telling me: this is where we're heading."
Aldric said nothing for a while. His hands had started trembling again. He pressed them flat against his thighs to still them.
"I've been a hedge mage for sixty years," he said. "Do you know what that means? It means I've spent sixty years being told that what I do isn't real magic. That real magic is what the academies teach, what the empires fund, what wins wars and builds cities. What I do — keep water clean, keep food from rotting, keep doors shut — that's not magic. That's handyman work with a bit of energy behind it."
He looked at the seed packets spread across the table before him. Valdross seeds. Exotic varieties from an imperial botanical garden. The kind of thing a hedge mage would never have been allowed to touch in any empire on the continent.
"Sixty years of being told I couldn't do real things," he said. "And then I helped bind a man's consciousness to a world tree. So I've learned to be careful about what I call impossible." He looked at her. "Build your shrine. Dedicate it to the Sower. Give people somewhere to gather. And if these images are direction rather than blueprints — then follow the direction. One step at a time."
Sera stood. Her legs were stiff again, and her eyes burned in a way she refused to acknowledge.
"Aldric."
"Yes?"
"The weapons. The concepts, not the specifics. Could you and the elven botanists start looking at what's actually possible? Heat-edged blades, layered armor, anything that takes what Chris showed me and makes it into something we can actually forge."
Aldric's trembling hands had gone still. Something had kindled behind his eyes — the same thing she'd seen in Oswin when he talked about trade routes. The particular hunger of a person who'd spent their whole life being small and had just been handed something large.
"I'll need the Valdross steel," he said. "And access to the elven texts on enchantment layering. And time."
"You'll have what I can get you."
She left the storehouse with the parchment roll pressing against her ribs and the taste of chamomile still faint on her tongue, even though it had been days since the first memory. The tree was visible above the rooftops, its canopy catching the late afternoon light. The pulse in the ground was steady under her boots.
One step at a time.
Korr was on the northern wall when she found him that evening. His fingers were working against the stone the way they always did now, tracing patterns in the grain. Below them, the green zone spread in its rough circle, new grass and the first wildflowers pushing up through soil that had been dead grey rock months ago. A centaur patrol moved along the eastern perimeter, hooves quiet on packed earth.
"You talked to the heroes," he said. Not a question.
"And Aldric. And Pell."
"And they told you the images were fiction."
"Elara, Gerd, Tomas, and Pell all confirmed it. Drawings from shows Chris watched in his world. Animation. Stories that someone made up and put on screens." She leaned against the wall beside him. "They also told me the concepts might be usable. Direction, not blueprints. Pell's word."
"Pell is a scholar. He'd find meaning in a stain on a tablecloth."
"Pell understood what Chris is doing better than any of them." Sera's voice carried an edge she didn't try to soften. "Chris grew up on those stories. They're how he thinks — in terms of big impossible things that get built one piece at a time by people who refuse to stop trying. He's not sending me a building plan. He's sending me the shape of a future he wants us to have, and it's my job to figure out how to get there with what we actually have."
Korr's fingers stopped moving on the stone.
"That's a lot of weight to put on a cartoon."
"They're not cartoons. They're his memories. The only memories he has left that aren't about dirt and starvation and waking up in a dead place with nothing." She turned to face him. "He's spending himself to send these to me. The shaman said each push costs him. He's doing it anyway. And you want me to treat it like noise?"
"I want you to be careful." Korr's voice was low. "You've been sleeping against that root every night for weeks. You talk to the tree like it's going to answer. You're building — what did you call it — a shrine? Based on images you received in a flood that the shaman herself said could have been a memory breaking loose."
"I'm not building anything yet. I'm planning."
"You're obsessing." The word landed harder than he'd intended. Korr's jaw shifted, but he didn't take it back. "I've watched people obsess before, Sera. Centuries of it. It starts with a purpose and turns into a hunger, and the hunger doesn't stop when the purpose is met. It just finds something new to eat."
"I'm not—"
"You wrote the drawings on your arm first. Charcoal on skin. Mira saw you doing it and thought you'd taken a fever." He turned to face her. Red eyes steady. "I'm not saying you're wrong about what the images mean. I'm saying you're so deep inside this that you can't see the edges anymore. The heroes said fiction. Five people from Chris's own world looked at what he sent you and said it can't be done. And your response is to go find more people who'll tell you it can."
"Because they were looking at it wrong."
"Or because you're looking at it the only way you can." Korr's voice was quiet. Not harsh. The opposite of harsh, which was worse. "You're an empath, Sera. You feel what other people feel whether you want to or not. And right now the only person you can't feel is the one person you want to feel more than anyone. So you're pouring everything into these images, these fragments, trying to build a bridge to him through — what? A shrine? Weapons that don't exist yet? A religious movement around a tree?"
She didn't answer. The wind had picked up, cold off the grey ground beyond the green zone. The tree's pulse beat through the wall beneath her hand, steady and patient, and she could feel the warmth of the root she slept against even from here — a thread of connection that ran through the ground like a vein.
"Chris believed in things that couldn't be done," she said finally. "That's how we got here. He believed a dead place could grow, and it grew. He believed a village full of refugees and broken people could hold off an empire, and they did. He believed he could fuse with a world tree and survive, and he did — barely, and at a cost I can't fully understand, but he did." She looked at Korr. "Maybe the images are just stories. Maybe they're just noise. But Chris has been right about impossible things before, and I'm not going to be the one who stops listening because the heroes told me it's all make-believe."
Below them, the refugee boy — the fifteen-year-old who was terrible with a sword — was practicing his forms in the fading light. All elbows, as she'd thought before. But he showed up every morning. Every morning.
Korr watched him for a moment. Then he turned back to the horizon.
"The shrine," he said. "If you're going to build it, do it right. Talk to the shaman. Talk to the centaur elder. Don't just — don't build it in a corner because you're in a hurry to make something real out of a feeling."
Sera nodded. She didn't trust her voice.
"And Sera."
"What."
"If the obsession starts eating you, I'll tell you. That's what I'm here for." He started walking along the wall toward the eastern steps. "Now come help me with the patrol schedule. We've got fourteen days before that imperial probe arrives, and you've spent the whole day talking about cartoons."
She followed him. Her hand found the parchment roll inside her coat, pressed against her ribs. The images were fading — she could feel them blurring at the edges, the way memories do when they're not reinforced. But the shrine-tree was still clear. Still sharp. The massive trunk, the roots like veins, the light, the gathered people.
Direction, not blueprints.
One step at a time.
The hammer rhythm started up again in the distance — Gerd, back from his break, working through something the way he worked through everything. Heavy. Steady. A man who'd been told the things he remembered were fiction and had gone back to hitting metal with a hammer anyway, because that was what he knew how to do.
Sera matched her stride to Korr's and let the rhythm of it — boots on stone, pulse through the ground, the faint warmth of a root somewhere beneath her feet — carry her forward into whatever came next.